Scott Adams captures the zeitgeist:

All non-fiction best-selling opinion books are nothing more than your own opinions fed back to you with seasoning. Ann Coulter sells to conservatives who agree with her. Al Franken sells to liberals who agree with him. And they do it brilliantly, in my opinion.

And what happens if you violate the pattern?

I often have no opinion at all about how we should deal with a world issue because I rarely feel I have enough information to make a good call. What I do have is strong opinions on how we should be THINKING about a problem. I’m all about the process[…] Thinking about the best way to approach a problem is so rare and unexpected that it causes cognitive dissonance in many readers. They want me to have an opinion so they can agree with it or disagree. So they solve the dissonance by assigning me to an opinion they have heard before – “cheese-eating surrender monkey” for example. And then they attack the opinion they hallucinated me to have.

And of course the reason that I enjoyed this piece is because I agree with it…. Scott just served up one of my opinions, with seasoning. Which demonstrates that even his “process” bias represents an opinion that people can endorse or reject. (It’s turtles all the way down.)